Frayed Knights - Talking Too Much

This is kinda delving deeper into a subject I’ve talked about before, but I tend to ramble about what’s on my mind lately, which has been consumed with “filling out” a lot of the world, NPC dialog, and lots of bug-fixing. A type of issue I keep running into in Frayed Knights 1 comes from two design decisions:

#1 – I decided to have conversations be full-fledged scripted conversations between all characters in the party, both among themselves and with NPCs, rather than the traditional approach of letting the NPC do all the talking in big blocks with a few one-line choices that will usually all be selected anyway. I can pull more characterization and humor out that way.

#2 – I have a lot of optional events or events that can occur in a free-form order.

These two design features have a somewhat complicated relationship. To understand this, you should recognize that traditional dialogs with NPCs in moden(ish) RPGs tend to be fairly generic and relatively context-free. The game simply locks out dialog options that no longer make sense, and the NPC spouts off blocks of exposition that only occasionally seem out-of-place given the current game state, and then only by player request. The player’s brain can fill in it’s own context to form the other side of the conversation, and even work itself into knots suspending disbelief when an NPC is talking about a dead villain as if he was still alive.